State of Hartford Schools

In order to have a context for the state of Hartford’s Schools today, you have to go back a while and reflect on where we have been.

There was a time when a student could drop out of school and still land a job – even in public service – that could support him and his family for life. In today’s economy, you need a college degree just to be considered for such employment.

There was a time when schools taught the same pedagogy and content. As a result, teachers were virtually interchangeable. And schools closed in the summer so that students could help harvest the crops.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that American education continues to remain structured in many ways for a society and an economy that ceased to exist many decades ago.

As a result, the United States, once the undisputed leader in educational achievement, has fallen further and further behind the other industrialized nations of the world.

The United States ranks 18th in the number of high school students who graduate high school on time. The world leader is South Korea.

U.S. teen-agers finished 21st out of 25 nations in reading and math on the International Assessment of Student Progress, behind Lithuania and Poland respectively.

According to UNICEF, the United States while spending more than any other country on education, ranked 18th among industrialized nations in the effectiveness of its education systems based upon the amount of money spent.

Within that framework of educational decline, you have Connecticut, the U.S. state with the largest achievement gap between low income urban students and their more affluent counterparts in the suburbs. And within Connecticut, you have Hartford, its largest school district with the largest number of economically disadvantaged students. Our city was perennially dead last in every measure of education achievement prior to 2006.

The condition of education in Hartford was such that in 1997, the state, through special legislation dissolved the dysfunctional, Hartford Board of Education and ran the district until 2002.

When local control was restored, Hartford graduation rates were lower than they were before the takeover.

Then, under the leadership of former mayor Eddie Pérez, a new Hartford Board of Education decided that it had had enough of failure and went about restructuring the district around the singular expectation of closing the achievement gap, with the goal of every child graduating high school and attending a four-year college. They began by adopting a managed performance empowerment theory of action, converting to an all choice system of schools with money following the child. Those concepts became the pillars of our reform.

At the same time Congress passed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act – which for all of its faults – remains the most important piece of civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act. It required that from now on, all education systems will be measured by how well they improve the achievement of their neediest students.

It created standards by which to gauge that improvement. Low income parents now know that if their child runs just a little bit faster than the suburban child who starts out in life a thousand yards ahead of him, he will eventually catch up – and there is an obligation on the part of the school that she or he attends to make that happen.

School reform in our nation has moved from theory to practice in the Obama Administration. Under Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, our federal government has sought to incentivize states into embracing reforms necessary to close the gap through its Race to the Top grant competition, which rewards states that genuinely commit to the change necessary to close the achievement gap.

As we all know, there are powerful, institutional, adult interests across the country - quite strong here in Connecticut - that are resisting to the changes needed close the achievement gap. They fail to take a long range view or understand that as long as our country and state continues its steady fall from educational grace, the economy and quality of life for everyone will diminish and alternatives to public education will become more and more sought after as the solution.

The challenge to closing the achievement gap has spawned a movement of education reformers, who share the same vision that the Hartford Board of Education boldly set into motion four years ago.

And today Hartford is one of the main stages of that reform movement.

Thanks to the generosity of the Sackler Foundation, the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington has been commissioned to develop a case study on Hartford’s school reform. The Center’s Director, Paul Hill, will be returning to Hartford in January to present his findings and comparison to other cities that are improving academic achievement.

On a national level, Hartford has been cited by Secretary Duncan and others as one of a handful of progressive school districts that have been successful in the turnaround of low performing schools.

On a state level, the Connecticut Commission on Educational Achievement issued a landmark report only last week recommending a comprehensive set of innovative changes to close the achievement gap in our State that mirror and expand many of the reform policies that have already been adopted by the Hartford Board of Education. I hope these recommendations will become the policy blueprint for Connecticut’s next governor.

Our schools have just completed their third straight year of significant increases on the Connecticut Mastery Test and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test that have established, once and for all, that you can have high performing schools in low income areas. I’d like to review highlights of the data from 2010 with you now:

Reading results are up again with an 8 percent increase in 3rd grade reading and 11 percent at the 10th grade. Third grade reading is the most predictive indicator of future student success. This year our schools recorded their highest increase in reading since the inception of CMT and CAPT testing in Connecticut.

Students rose in mathematics at every grade level in Hartford.

Our graduation rate, which stood at 29 percent in 2006, has now reached 50 percent and, based on that success record, the U.S. Dept. of Education recently awarded Hartford $13.3 million to help increase our graduation rate even further.
Here’s the profile of achievement in our schools today:

The number of schools testing at Goal– Connecticut’s highest achievement category – increased from five to 10. That means that 10 Hartford Public Schools have effectively closed the achievement gap – a list that includes three neighborhood schools: Achievement First, Dwight Elementary and Parkville Community School.

In another step in the plan to convert to an all-choice system of distinctive schools, four more new and redesigned schools opened this year: Asian Studies from the merger of Dwight and Bellizzi, The Betances Early Reading Lab School, the Rawson Middle Grades Academy, and Connecticut’s first STEM School at Annie Fisher. Several new choice schools, including High School, Inc, Opportunity High School and Breakthrough II began their second year and become choice for parents.

Overall in 2010, Hartford’s CMT and CAPT scores improved at more than double the rest of the state. So in 2010 another step was taken to close the achievement gap.

Today, our District has its own Renzulli Academy for Gifted and Talented students.

In 2010, the Board of Education also gave parents and other stakeholders a major say in how their schools are managed through the formation of School Governance Councils. Among each council’s most important duties are the approval of the school budget each year, the development of an accountability plan that sets educational goals, approval of the school compact and the recommendation of a new principal in the event of a vacancy.

Hartford’s successes have come with major challenges for sure – the most severe of which is economic:

For two years, 2009-10 and 2010-11, the state’s flat-funding of education has forced the district to eliminate approximately 350 positions, including almost 150 teachers, to meet rising expenses. Now, with the pending expiration of stimulus funding, the state faces a shortfall of $175M in education funding, which translates into an additional loss to Hartford of about 25 million in 2011-2012. We have to accept that this will be a permanent adjustment to the size of government in which education is the largest segment.

In 2006, when student achievement was at its lowest, Hartford’s per pupil expenditure was over $15,000. It is now $13,600 and student achievement is much higher. We will have to design a system of effective, high-performing schools at an expenditure level of about $12,000 per pupil. This has to be carefully and thoughtfully done, guided by the premise that what we spend money on is more important than how much money we spend; and what we do in the future is more determinative of our outcomes than what we have done in the past.

This year, there will be a focus on better middle grades education. Nationally, student performance is flat in the middle grades. In Hartford, when we ran junior high schools at Fox and Quirk it actually declined as a result of attending these schools. It is better now at K-8 schools, but still behind student achievement at our flagship Hartford Magnet Middle School (HMMS).

Our first step this year was the creation of the Middle Grades Academy at Sara J. Rawson, modeled after the HMMS Core-Encore model. This year will mark the planning for opening in August 2011 of two new 6-8 middle schools at McDonough (450 student) and West Middle (300 students). These schools will be designed to meet the needs of the transescent, that challenging stage between childhood and adolescence. One school will adopt the national Expeditionary Learning Model and the other the Core-Encore design, giving us four middle schools utilizing two research-based programs and providing a choice for parents between K-8 schools and a K-5, 6-8 model.

To close the gap, our students desperately need more time in school; more time in instruction in the form up a longer day and/or year. In 2009, an audit by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) revealed that Hartford had the shortest school day in the region. A neighboring district, with which we are trying to close the gap, had a 45 minute longer school day, offering its students the equivalent of a full month more of instruction. Our children deserve the same and their needs demand it.

We have the opportunity, through the negotiation of several of our major collective bargaining agreements this year, to at least create a competitive school day so our children who need instruction time the most, do not receive less.

As we progress and our reform is strengthened this year, we will have a transition of superintendent leadership this summer and a renewal or transition of appointed Board membership next January, or perhaps some of both, depending on the election of the next mayor.

I think it will be very helpful that the Board of Education has adopted a Superintendent Succession Policy that enables it to look first to the several outstanding leaders of our reform currently within our system who can provide continuity and maintain direction while adjusting to current data, and changing circumstances to bring our system of schools to the next level. We are very different than we were 4 years ago and should be very different 5 years from now even as the same outcomes and theory of action are pursued.

And most helpful will be our collective commitment to develop more good schools faster and our lack of tolerance for chronically low-performing schools.
We tend to over emphasize the effect that any person or set of people at Central Office can have on the opportunities we provide to students through our schools.

While leadership is important, particularly at the school level, the distribution of leadership is much more important. That is the essential premise of our managed performance empowerment theory of action that envisions a system of autonomous, distinctive independent schools, in which decisions are made by the principal, staff and parents of that school.

We are mistaken to think someone else with powers like Superman is going to come and accomplish the difficult things that have to be done to close the achievement gap. But we should know we have the power collectively to make things right for our children. This is not to imply that it’s easy. It’s hard and it requires hard work, political will and courage at times in addition to knowledge of the content, science and best practices of school reform; and as you know, there are many distractions.

But if this were easy someone else would have already done it and we would not be needed. Please remember that great line from the intro to the movie Waiting for Superman: “We are the one we’ve been waiting for…..” And let’s continue this crusade until every student in our City is able to attend a good school, a school that changes their life trajectory and life prospects simply because they were lucky enough to have attended that school.
So, what is the state of our schools?

Three years ago, I had to answer that question and said at that time that I thought it was very fragile. At that point, we had embarked on a reform strategy, the Board had adopted a theory of action and a framework for the creation of a portfolio of higher performing schools and we had redesigned the first five lowest performing schools that had just opened. There was lots of opposition, not enough understanding and our capacity to communicate the changes was woefully inadequate.

The state of our schools is much stronger today. It would be harder and take longer now to reverse the progress we’ve made. It is more convincing, in that you have demonstrated it multiple proof points that we can have a high-performing school regardless of the income level of the students who attend it.

At the same time, it is more compelling. The progress we have made shines a brighter and harsher light on how much more needs to be accomplished and how much more we have to change. In a system that has moved from a graduation rate of 29 percent to 50 percent what do we now do about the other 50 percent? In schools that improved from 25 percent to 40 percent of students reading on grade level, what does it take and how long does it take for the other 60 percent to achieve at the same high level? When do we reach the Sheff tipping point of 80 percent of Hartford families choosing Hartford schools rather than schools outside of Hartford that ends the exodus of families from City schools? When can every child realize his or her full potential by attending a good school?

And so, the state of our schools is stronger, convincing, more compelling, yet incomplete. So let’s get back to work like never before and seize this moment, this year, this period ahead when the wind of national school reform is blowing strong at our backs (even in this land of steady habits) to do more, faster, and to recommit ourselves to the gap-closing outcomes of Hartford’s education reform and create a better future for more of our students and for our City and our State.